Impact coverup

Over the last few weeks, with the sudden explosion of anger, partisan politics, and fake news, I fear we are moving into a period where our actions are no longer governed by facts, but by kneejerk reactions to media who are telling people what they want to hear and covering up what they'd prefer we don't know.

And of course, once such a tendency becomes widespread, there arise people who will deliberately and cynically engage in this kind of thing in order to manipulate what information gets out to the public.  As a particularly egregious example of this, look at the Environmental Protection Agency's last report on the danger of hydrofracking to drinking water.

The report, which was issued in June 2015, was revealed two days ago to have amendments that were made immediately before release, thus preventing anyone who worked on it from having the opportunity to fix them.  These amendments did only one thing: they downplayed the risks of fracking.  The summary concluded that fracking did not have "widespread systemic impacts" on drinking water, despite there being 250 documented cases of drinking water contamination from fracking -- in the state of Pennsylvania alone.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But such a result runs against the agenda of using natural gas as a replacement for coal.  You even hear this from the pro-renewables folks; gas, they say (correctly) is cleaner burning than coal, and could provide a stopgap bridge between coal and renewables like wind and solar.  This, however, looks at only one feature of natural gas as a resource -- its capacity for creating air pollution -- conveniently ignoring the potential problems from gas extraction, especially by fracking.

And of course, it also pretends that anthropogenic climate change doesn't exist, that it's safe for the long-term habitability of the planet to go on using fossil fuels, despite the fact that scientists have concluded that to do anything substantive about climate change would require immediate drastic cutbacks on fossil fuel use now, stopgaps be damned.

Things are only set to get worse under the new administration, which has pledged to return us to coal use.  "Clean coal" (there's no such thing) was one of Donald Trump's clarion calls in his stump speeches, which was music to the ears of people in West Virginia and Pennsylvania who have seen widespread job losses as coal mining and processing jobs have been lost.  (Not to downplay the economic devastation in these communities; clearly we have done a piss-poor job of making sure that lost jobs and crumbling infrastructure are replaced by sustainable employment.  But returning to coal mining and burning is not the way to do it, for multiple rather pressing reasons.)

Michael Halperin, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who is one of the people that uncovered the changes to the EPA document, was grim about the future.  "Given the names that are circulating for key positions in the Trump administration, who are oil and gas industry insiders and lobbyists," Halperin said, "I’m very concerned that science that is critical to protecting public health and safety will be more vulnerable to spin and suppression."

So am I, Dr. Halperin.  A lot of us are worried, given the incoming administration's outspoken support for weakening environmentally-based restrictive laws such as the Clean Power Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act, not to mention suggestions that the handover of the EPA to Myron Ebell (who referred to climate scientists and their supporters as "climate criminals") might be a prelude to dismantling it altogether.  We seem poised to cede unprecedented power to the oil lobby and anti-environmentalists, with potentially devastating consequences not only to our own ecosystems, but the whole Earth's.

So the coverup of the truth about fracking and drinking water is only the tip of the iceberg.  We're being steered to believe that a business as usual (or worse, a "drill, baby, drill") approach to fossil fuel use is the way to go, despite incontrovertible evidence that such a policy amounts to a slow-motion train wreck -- and the media is the one with its hands on the steering wheel.

Fracking, the EPA, and slanted journalism

Popular media make me crazy sometimes.

It's intensely frustrating to see science misrepresented by news outlets, and people unquestioningly accepting that misrepresentation as fact.  Some copy writer with who-knows-what background in actual science is given the task of summarizing scientific research, and then it's headlined with a catchy phrase that not only doesn't reflect the story accurately but simply reiterates whatever political slant that media corporation has.  Readers then take away from that inaccurate summary whatever they got from it -- sometimes only by reading the headline -- and interpret it via whatever biases they came equipped with.

Any wonder why the average American's knowledge of science is so skewed?

Take, for example, the recent report by the Environmental Protection Agency regarding hydrofracking and its effect on drinking water.  Here's a brief excerpt:

From our assessment, we conclude there are above and below ground mechanisms by which hydraulic fracturing activities have the potential to impact drinking water resources. These mechanisms include water withdrawals in times of, or in areas with, low water availability; spills of hydraulic fracturing fluids and produced water; fracturing directly into underground drinking water resources; below ground migration of liquids and gases; and inadequate treatment and discharge of wastewater.

We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States. Of the potential mechanisms identified in this report, we found specific instances where one or more mechanisms led to impacts on drinking water resources, including contamination of drinking water wells. The number of identified cases, however, was small compared to the number of hydraulically fractured wells. This finding could reflect a rarity of effects on drinking water resources, but may also be due to other limiting factors. These factors include: insufficient pre- and post-fracturing data on the quality of drinking water resources; the paucity of long-term systematic studies; the presence of other sources of contamination precluding a definitive link between hydraulic fracturing activities and an impact; and the inaccessibility of some information on hydraulic fracturing activities and potential impacts.

So far, kind of an equivocal finding.  There has been some well contamination... but it doesn't seem to be very frequent... but it does sometimes happen... but there could be several reasons for that including "inaccessibility of information" -- i.e., the natural gas corporations not releasing said information when contamination happens, or maneuvering the people affected into silence via gag orders.

Understandable, of course, that the EPA wants to keep a low profile these days, considering the number of legislators who would like to see it defunded or dismantled completely.  So it's unsurprising that they're taking a "maybe so, maybe not" approach and trying to fly under the radar.

But that, of course, is not how the media spun the report.  The day the report was released, The Washington Times and The New York Post both had articles headlined, "EPA: Fracking Doesn't Harm Drinking Water."  The Times later amended their headline to read "EPA Finds Fracking Poses No Direct Threat to Drinking Water" after enough people wrote in to say, "Did you people even read the report?"  Which is marginally better but still not reflective of the waffling language in the report itself.  Even Newsweek went that way, with an article headlined, "Fracking Doesn't Pollute Drinking Water, EPA Says."

But lest you think that the conservative, pro-fracking media sources were the only ones who gave the report their own unique spin, the liberal, anti-fracking sources were just as quick to jump in and claim that the report proved that fracking was highly dangerous.  Common Dreams, an online progressive news source, ran it as "EPA Report Finds Fracking Water Pollution, Despite Oil and Gas Industry's Refusal to Provide Key Data."  Nation of Change had the story headlined with, "Long-Awaited EPA Study Says Fracking Pollutes Drinking Water," along with the following photograph:

So the conservative outlets told the conservative readers what they wanted to hear, and the liberal outlets told the liberal readers what they wanted to hear, and neither one reflected accurately what the original report said, which was virtually nothing of substance.

Add to that the fact that what little the EPA's report did say was immediately called into question, in one of those examples of weird synchronicity, by the resignation of Mark Nechodom, director of the California Department of Conservation, the day after the report was released -- over allegations that he had looked the other way while natural gas companies disposed of fracking wastewater by injecting it into central California agricultural and drinking water aquifers.

"Nechodom was named this week in a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of a group of Kern County farmers who allege that [California Governor Jerry] Brown, the oil and gas division and others conspired with oil companies to allow the illegal injections and to create a more lax regulatory environment for energy firms," an article in The Los Angeles Times said.  "Nechodom's resignation was unexpected, although he had increasingly been called upon by state officials to explain problems in the oil and gas division’s oversight of the oil industry and a parade of embarrassing blunders."

Not only that, a criticism levied against the EPA report itself appeared in EcoWatch, claiming that the writers of the report cherry-picked their data to ignore cases of contamination, including 313 documented cases of well contamination in a six-county region in Pennsylvania.  You have to wonder how much damage there'd have to be before the EPA did consider it "widespread."

So once again, we have government agencies waffling and misrepresenting the data, special interests and slanted media obscuring the real situation, and hardly anyone checking their sources, resulting in everyone pretty much thinking what they thought before.

And, of course, doing nothing about the actual problem.

The whole thing makes me want to scream.  Because what we need is responsible media, giving accurate and comprehensive reporting on issues like this -- not more shallow and skewed blurbs that do nothing but muddy the water (as it were).  And we need readers who are willing to follow the first rule of critical thinking -- check your sources.

And we also need government agencies that are willing to bite the bullet and tell people the truth, come-what-may.

And because none of that is likely, what I need is a couple of ibuprofen and another cup of coffee, because all of this depressing stuff has given me a headache.